Top Vatican adviser Jeffrey Sachs says that when
Pope Francis visits the United States in September, he will directly challenge
the “American idea” of God-given rights embodied in the Declaration of
Independence.

Sachs, a special advisor to the United Nations and
director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a media superstar
who can always be counted on to pontificate endlessly on such topics as income
inequality and global health. This time, writing in a Catholic publication, he
may have gone off his rocker, revealing the real global game plan.

The United States, Sachs writes in the Jesuit publication, America, is “a
society in thrall” to the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. But the “urgent core of Francis’ message” will be to
challenge this “American idea” by “proclaiming that the path to happiness lies
not solely or mainly through the defense of rights but through the exercise of
virtues, most notably justice and charity.”

In these extraordinary comments, which constitute a
frontal assault on the American idea of freedom and national sovereignty, Sachs
has made it clear that he hopes to enlist the Vatican in a global campaign to
increase the power of global or foreign-dominated organizations and movements.

Sachs takes aim at the phrase, which comes from
America’s founding document, the United States Declaration of Independence,
that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These rights sound good, Sachs writes, but they’re
not enough to guarantee the outcome the global elites have devised for us.
Global government, he suggests, must make us live our lives according to
international standards of development.

“In the United States,” Sachs writes, “we learn
that the route to happiness lies in the rights of the individual. By throwing
off the yoke of King George III, by unleashing the individual pursuit of
happiness, early Americans believed they would achieve that happiness. Most
important, they believed that they would find happiness as individuals, each
endowed by the creator with individual rights.”

While he says there is some “grandeur in this
idea,” such rights “are only part of the story, only one facet of our
humanity.”

The Sachs view is that global organizations such as
the U.N. must dictate the course of nations and individual rights must be
sacrificed for the greater good. One aspect of this unfolding plan, as outlined
in the Sachs book, The End of Poverty, involves extracting billions of
dollars from the American people through global taxes.

“We will need, in the end, to put real resources in
support of our hopes,” he wrote. “A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels
might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is
needed to correct humanity’s climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would
finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods.” Sachs has estimated the price tag for the U.S. at $845 billion.

In preparation for this direct assault on our
rights, the American nation-state, and our founding document, United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon told a Catholic Caritas International conference
in Rome on May 12 that climate change is “the defining challenge of our time,”
and that the solution lies in recognizing that “humankind is part of nature,
not separate or above.”

The pope’s expected encyclical on climate change is
supposed to help mobilize the governments of the world in this crusade.

But a prestigious group of scholars, churchmen,
scientists, economists, and policy experts has issued a detailed rebuttal,
entitled, “An Open Letter to Pope Francis
on Climate Change,”
pointing out that the Bible tells man to have dominion over the earth.

“Good climate policy must recognize human
exceptionalism, the God-given call for human persons to ‘have dominion’ in the
natural world (Genesis 1:28), and the need to protect the poor from harm,
including actions that hinder their ascent out of poverty,” the letter to Pope
Francis states.

Released by a group called the Cornwall Alliance, the letter urges the Vatican
to consider the evidence that climate change is largely natural, that the human
contribution is comparatively small and not dangerous, and that attempting to
mitigate the human contribution by reducing CO2 emissions “would cause more
harm than good, especially to the world’s poor.”

However, it appears as if the Vatican has been
captured by the globalist forces associated with Sachs and the United Nations.

Voice of the Family, a group representing pro-life and
pro-family Catholic organizations from around the world, has taken issue not
only with the Vatican’s involvement with Sachs, but with Ban Ki Moon,
describing the two as “noted advocates of abortion who operate at the highest
levels of the United Nations. ”Sachs has been described as
“arguably the world’s foremost proponent of population control,” including
abortion.

Voice of the Family charges that environmental
issues such as climate change have become “an umbrella to cover a wide spectrum
of attacks on human life and the family.”

Although Sachs likes to claim he was an adviser to
Pope John Paul II, the noted anti-communist and pro-life pontiff, Sachs simply
served as a member of a group of economists invited to confer with the
Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace in advance of the release of a papal
document.

In fact, Pope John Paul II had worked closely with
the Reagan administration in opposition to communism and the global population
control movement. He once complained that a U.N. conference on population
issues was designed to “destroy the family” and was the “snare of the devil.”

Pope Francis, however, seems to have embraced the
very movements opposed by John Paul II.

Sachs, who has emerged as a very influential
Vatican adviser, recently tweeted that he was “thrilled”
to be at the Vatican “discussing moral dimensions of climate change and
sustainable development.” The occasion was a Vatican workshop on global warming
on April 28, 2015, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Roman
Catholic Church. Sachs was a featured speaker.

“The Network has proposed draft Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) which contain provisions that are radically
antagonistic to the right to life from conception to natural death, to the
rights and dignity of the family and to the rights of parents as the primary
educators of their children,” states the group Voice of the Family.

In July, a Financing for Development conference
will be held, in order to develop various global tax proposals, followed by a
conference in Paris in December to complete a new climate change agreement.

Before that December conference, however, Sachs
says the pope will call on the world at the United Nations to join the crusade
for a New World Order.

Sachs says, “Pope Francis will come to the United
States and the United Nations in New York on the occasion of the 70th
anniversary of the United Nations, and at the moment when the world’s 193
governments are resolved to take a step in solidarity toward a better world. On
Sept. 25, Pope Francis will speak to the world leaders—most likely the largest
number of assembled heads of state and government in history—as these leaders
deliberate to adopt new Sustainable Development Goals for the coming
generation. These goals will be a new worldwide commitment to build a world
that aims to harmonize the pursuit of economic prosperity with the commitments
to social inclusion and environmental sustainability.”

Rather than emphasize the absolute need for safeguarding
individual rights in the face of government overreach and power, Sachs writes
that the Gospel teachings of humility, love, and justice, “like the teachings
of Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius,” can take us on a “path to happiness
through compassion” and “become our guideposts back to safety.”

Writing elsewhere in the new issue of America,
Christiana Z. Peppard, an assistant professor of theology, science, and ethics
at Fordham University, writes about the “planetary pope,” saying, “What is
really at stake in the collective response to the pope’s encyclical is not,
ultimately, whether our treasured notions of theology, science, reality or
development can accommodate moral imperatives. The real question is whether we
are brave enough and willing to try.”

The plan is quite simple: world government through
global taxes, with a religious face to bring it about.

This article originally appeared at AIM.org and is reprinted here with
permission.

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